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I think you're missing the point--he's saying that the owners are losing money because of investments that are not related to player salaries or baseball operations, which is a very acute observation from someone who knows more about the finances of MLB than just about anyone. I wouldn't say Boras is someone who knows more about the finances of MLB. He may know more than the average fan but the majority of what he is saying can be deducted logically. The owners are not losing money because of investments. When you don't have a revenue stream coming in you are going to be losing money regardless if you have investments or not. So no he is not nailing it. Huh? The only relevant question to this debate is whether the TV revenues alone can cover the pro-rated salaries + baseball operations. Boras' point is that yes, they can, because players do not have a stake in the franchise. So those losses are not the players' responsibility to cover. And he's shrewdly pointing out that when these ballpark investments were profitable the owners have made the same argument, resulting in player salaries decoupling from franchise values.

I think you're missing the point--he's saying that the owners are losing money because of investments that are not related to player salaries or baseball operations, which is a very acute observation from someone who knows more about the finances of MLB than just about anyone.

Scott Boras nails it...

After getting out of bed at 8:10 for an 8:30 zoom meeting this morning I had the realization that I will never work another job in my life that requires 5 days/week of commuting. It's quite liberating.

As long as they have a deal by June 1 there is no impact to the timeline.

I think real world Stearns/Counsell would be better at tinkering with the pitching staff and finding the correct roles for everyone. In simulation land it seems like someone else in the NL Central is going to get hot while the Brewers will linger around .500 and ultimately miss the playoffs. Unless they make some serious moves to get some pitching. It's a little easier for the sim to figure out the offense although slightly hilarious that Sogard is on pace for a 5 WAR season.

That seems like an incredibly dumb strategy in any sales field unless you are absolutely sure your prospective client is on the same political wavelength. You'd be surprised how many RE agents posts political memes on their personal pages It's stupid for a number of reasons, but mainly because there currently a big shift in RE going on as people who can't afford homes in cities are looking to buy homes in the hinterlands given their new freedom to work remotely. So if you are an RE agent in one of those areas you could make some serious cash if you can cater to the interests of people from cities, who are almost unanimous in taking COVID precautions seriously.

It’s not easy to be the MLB commish...MLB fans have a tendency to push back hard against changes to the sport. Attempts to grow the fan base are often at odds with what the core group of fans wants. But there are some really obvious things that could be done to grow the sport over the long term and make fans happy and they are non-starters because they would hurt the short-term bottom line...e.g. ending blackouts. And the general obsession with profit above all means that nobody trusts Manfred to do the right thing for the sport. And the players rightfully do not trust anything coming from the owners for that reason. I still think they get a 2020 agreement but I worry about the next CBA.

Instant Pot is definitely the way to go for shredded meats. I've heard you can get good pastrami in the Instant Pot also but I haven't tried yet.

Yes, mainstream as well as social media are having a field day projecting demographic stereotypes on the COVID response or lack thereof. Meanwhile, the actual data continues to indicate that >80% of people are generally on the same page with COVID. So the unity in defeating COVID should be the main story, which is especially remarkable given the attempts by many to divide people. I've had many friends ask me about Wisconsin's open bars/restaurants thanks to the media stories...but the reality is that cell phone data shows almost no increase in movement (like 3% or something like that) in WI since the restrictions were lifted. We recently got referred to a real estate agent who opened up our meeting by bashing the governor and the state's COVID response...what a stupid thing to do. Maybe the echo chamber of the 15-20% that disagree with the rules is so strong that they don't even realize everyone else thinks they are nuts? All the family I've talked to in Wisconsin, who are all over the political spectrum, are following the advice of experts and continuing to take precautions. That seems like a huge victory and yet nobody is talking about that.

My interpretation is that almost all of the negotiations are pre-2021 CBA talk. The safety stuff is mostly being used as leverage. When the deadline for negotiating 2020 comes up they will punt all of that to next year.

The fans/media of every contender want Giannis to leave Milwaukee and come to them. The Milwaukee media needs to take a page from the bigger cities and get to work with speculation of how every other superstar could pair with Giannis IN Milwaukee. Get that rumor mill going!!! Why hasn't anyone written about how Steph Curry could finish his career in Milwaukee???

What, you don't have a sourdough starter yet? /s

Grocery stores are now not allowing you to bring in reusable bags, and you either have to put the items back in your cart (good luck with that at the self-checkout kiosks) and take the cart to your car and pack them there or use the store's plastic bags which we have been continually reinforced over the years not to do. One of the organizations in my industry is recommending that plates/dinnerware/utensils at facilities now be disposable. Can't have someone wearing gloves put them in the dishwasher. Back to polluting the environment. Most of the big west coast cities have figured out curbside compost pickup and require disposable utensils to be compostable. Although with cities being broke using non-compostable plastic will probably be the result. I do think this crisis has been a much-needed lesson for climate change mitigation. Crashing the economy is not the way to solve climate change, and even the huge reductions in commerce have done essentially nothing for reducing CO2 concentrations. Now would be a good time for a big investment in green energy on a global scale.

After seeing the report of likely coronavirus in the Seattle area in December, I'm curious to get an antibody test. I was extremely sick with what I thought was the flu just after Christmas. Worst sickness I've had in many years, especially bad in the chest. About a month before that I spent 2 weeks traveling all over Southeast Asia including close contact with Chinese tourists in Vietnam. I figured that was too early to have caught the virus but maybe not...

What happens if the hospital care providers catch COVID and all of them get hospitalized/sent home for 2 weeks?

I have no doubt they will come to a compromise, otherwise everyone gets paid $0 and that will not happen. But when it comes down to it the owners signed guaranteed contracts and the players are the ones taking a risk to play during a pandemic. They still have several weeks to work out the terms.

Yes, most state schools did that. As well as raising enrollment as fast as possible. And often revenue sent to individual departments was tied to class enrollment to incentivize the creation of more space for students. When my department realized this they started creating new elective classes with sexy titles to increase their revenue. This wasn't necessarily bad strategy as students do need available classes to fulfill their credit obligations. And it helped make online courses a higher priority with better quality options. But it was just funny to see some of the unintended consequences. And the TAs/adjuncts who were responsible for all those extra students end up shouldering the burden.

You're exactly right - it shouldn't be a business. But if they are going to provide a high quality education at reasonable tuition prices while competitively compensating their employees, maybe they need to think like a business. The fundamental question that every business owner/CEO/executive asks themselves every day is, "How do we provide the highest quality product or service for our target market at the lowest operating cost while competitively compensating our employees so that they don't leave?" If public higher education doesn't think that way and tries to be everything to everyone, then they shouldn't complain about the cost of tuition or low pay for employees. They did ask this question and they did it when business people started taking over the admin! Target market: the richest possible students (or those with FAFSA money) who can increase our revenue. And build fancy facilities that will appeal to that demographic. Highest quality product: Our paying customers don't like getting bad grades--inflate the grades and punish anyone who gives students a challenging class (which always generates lower survey ratings from students). Lowest operating cost: Exploit cheap labor from graduate students and adjunct faculty. Competitively compensating employees: that's how we ended up football coaches being the highest-paid public employee in most states.

Mostly I echo SoCal but will add a bit more from my experience... 1. Almost everyone in an academic job at a university is badly underpaid. I make $57,000 to be a postdoctoral researcher at a university which is at least half and possibly only a third of my value. It applies to tenured professors as well...their skillsets and work ethics are worth $300,000+ in the private sector compared with ~$150K pay at universities. And even tenured professors have left academia for research jobs in tech--I've seen it happen several times. 2. It is not the purpose of a university to teach skills X, Y, Z. Anybody can learn skills X, Y, Z by themselves. Three of my close friends are self-taught software engineers working at Google and Amazon now. Two dropped out of their graduate programs, the third doesn't even have a college degree. All three exhibit independent thinking and intellectual curiosity which are some of the most valuable traits anyone can have--and of course those traits were fostered by being immersed in an in-person academic environment in undergrad. And besides, skills X, Y, Z are already being rapidly replaced by new skills that will have to be learned on the fly. 3. A bachelor's degree in a STEM field is often entirely worthless by itself. I feel very bad for many undergraduate students in my field who are not motivated to be there and getting mediocre grades that will disqualify them from most postgraduate opportunities. We would be far better off if they were studying whatever was interesting to them, getting better grades, and then going to graduate school to get the degree that will actually launch their career. 4. The whole STEM vs. humanities construct is rapidly disappearing. More and more I'm seeing scientists head toward the humanities/social sciences to broaden the depth and impact of their studies. More and more I'm seeing academics in the humanities head toward the sciences to apply their work. It's mutually beneficial and everyone loves interdisciplinary studies.

Groupthink is an evolutionary trait. It happens to an extent in any group of people. Including people who read a few news stories about a handful university professors and turn that into a sweeping assumption about how they operate.

Rumored revenue sharing between the players and league? Now you have my attention. Supposedly the owners only want it for one year, but the players have all the leverage right now.

Good grief this is depressing. My opinions won't change the measures these places are taking. Things like this are just a kick in the gut. Makes you realize how long this is actually going to drag out. I'm already concerned about school starting on time. The clear conclusion is that there is no "reopening" or "return to normal" and there never will be. Most people will eventually go back to the office, travel, etc but will do so in very different ways than they did before.

Amazon just announced their October 2 reopening plan for the corporate headquarters yesterday. -Temperature taken on arrival -Social distanced desks -Limit of 1 person per meeting room -All meetings required to be virtual -Masks required for any interactions with others -No services (coffee shops/restaurants) In other words, nothing is going to change until there is either a vaccine or cheap+abundant testing. Because nobody is going to go to the office with those rules. And nobody is going to be able to get to the office anyway because of the limitations to reopening public transportation.

I don't write academic papers, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. But I need to ask -- what happens if you, as a scientist, find evidence that contradicts common knowledge in the field? What percentage of people need to agree in order to be considered common knowledge? I don't know how Galileo and Mendel would have answered this question. The challenge today is that there is simply sooooooooo much information, that it is difficult for people -- even highly educated people -- to know what is "right" and what is "wrong." I'll keep coming to bf.net for the right answers... That's a good question! I could write for hours about this and even so my experience is only specific to atmospheric/climate science. Everyone is so highly specialized these days. It is very rare for there to be a reversal of common knowledge because the scientific process works pretty well and it has grown enough that a couple grumpy old guys can't control things like they used to. Generally what pushes things forward is not a new idea but new technology that allows for either data or analysis that wasn't possible before. And the result tends to be refinement or complexity added to established ideas. In my experience, if you push on an established theory at a conference you will usually get some people on board and some people opposed. And over time if you keep providing evidence and hammering away you will eventually move the needle. And if you are wrong the experts will figure it out pretty quickly. The attitude toward machine learning in my field has been interesting to watch. At first it was just a couple people pushing it forward and they were initially met with a ton of skepticism. But they continued to produce better and better results that were harder to dispute, and suddenly in the last year or two there was this exponential explosion in people embracing this tool. Most people in science are honestly trying to come up with new ideas, especially these days when most of us could leave for more lucrative careers in private industry at any time. With COVID things are moving so fast and people are desperate for an extraordinary discovery. Honestly, it could happen with how many people are working on the problem and how much the science has been moving forward lately in genetics. But the experts know pretty well what is possible and what isn't, so when they say "18 months to a vaccine" then either we need to listen to them or we need to throw a ton of resources at that problem to try and speed it up. The key is that the people with the money/resources need to know what they are doing, too often the money gets sent to people who have no idea what they are doing, especially in a crisis. If the consensus in the field is 18 months to a vaccine and someone says "I can do it in 6 months" then they are probably full of BS.